"Well, they've got to eat, ain't they?" inquired Lizzie Ann. "That's all I say. Come, ain't you got your shoe on yet? Why, yes, you have. Come along. There's a kind of chill in the air, if 'tis September."
Mariana heard them rising, Sophronia contributing soft thuds of a good-sized middle-aged body and Lizzie with a light scramble suited to her weight.
"Mercy!" said Sophronia, "ain't you stiff?"
Then they went on together, and Mariana heard in the near distance the familiar patter dealing with Sophronia's proficiency in mock mince-pies. They were safely away, but she did not move. The cool September breeze rustled the blackberry-vines on her side of the wall, but it did not chill her. She was hot with some emotion she could not name,—anger, perhaps, though it hardly seemed like that, resentment that her friends could talk her over; and some hurt in the very centre of feeling because the shyness of her soul had been invaded. It seemed so simple to carry Jake Preble a pie of her own baking, as natural as for him to cut her wood and shovel paths for her in the worst winter weather. When it was a beautiful clearing-off day after a storm, she loved to sweep her paths herself, and Jake knew it; but he was always near to rescue her when the drifts piled too high. But then Cap'n Hanscom came, too, and he was a widower, and once Sophronia's own husband had taken a hand at the snowy citadel. Angry maidenhood in her kept hurling questions into the deepening dusk. Mariana was learning that in a world of giving in marriage, no woman and no man who have not accorded hostages to fortune can live unchallenged.
When her ireful mood had worn itself away, she got up with the stiffness of the mind's depression intensifying the body's chill, and made her way swiftly toward home. She walked fast, because it seemed to her she could not possibly bear to meet a neighbor. Even through the dusk her tell-tale basket would be visible, the dishes in it clinking to the tune that Mariana was no sort of a woman to marry.
When she reached home, she fled up the path to the door, feeling at every step the friendliness of the way. The late fall flowers nodded kindly to her through the dark, and underfoot were the stones and hollows of the pathway familiar to her from a life's acquaintanceship.
"My sakes," breathed Mariana.
A man was sitting on her steps, and because Jake was so vividly present to her mind, she almost spoke his name. But it was only Cap'n Hanscom, rising as she neared him, and opening the door gallantly.
"I says to myself, she'll be along in a minute or two," he told her.
The cap'n had a soft voice touched here and there with whimsical tones. When he was absent, Mariana often thought how much she liked his voice; but whenever she saw him she consumed her friendly interest in wishing he wouldn't wear a beard. She was a fastidious woman, and a beard seemed to her untidy.